Editorial: No justice for Michigan's juvenile lifers

Jul. 9, 2014

PATRICIA BECK/Detroit Free Press

Written by

the Detroit Free Press Editorial Board

Two years have passed since the U.S. Supreme Court demanded that criminal courts acknowledge what parents, educators and medical researchers have recognized for decades: that teenagers are more vulnerable to negative influences, less culpable for their criminal impulses, and more susceptible to rehabilitation than the adults with whom they share living quarters in most Michigan prisons.

Now, in a 4-3 ruling denying legal relief to Michigan teens sentenced prior to the high court’s 2012 ruling in Miller v. Alabama, Michigan Supreme Court justices have elected to keep our criminal justice system in the dark ages. Their unconscionable decision in the cases of two juvenile lifers seeking new sentencing hearings is a defeat for reason that subordinates simple fairness to politics and administrative convenience.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling bars Michigan and other states from enforcing sentencing laws that once mandated a sentence of life in prison with no possibility of parole for certain juvenile homicide offenders, regardless of their age when the crime took place. Ever since, juveniles convicted for killings that took place before they turned 18 have been entitled to hearings in which the sentencing judge must consider the defendant’s age, mental and emotional development, and potential for rehabilitation, among other factors, before determining whether the defendant should be sentenced to die in prison.

The only issue in the case state Supreme Court justices decided this week was whether the juvenile lifers who exhausted their appeals before Michigan’s old mandatory sentencing law was declared unconstitutional were entitled to be resentenced under the new procedure ordained in Miller v. Alabama.

Many states have already ordered new hearings for all the juvenile lifers in their prisons, reasoning that to do otherwise would create two classes of children, distinguished only by the date of their offenses. In the case decided Monday, an unusual coalition of retired judges, prosecutors, probation officers and corrections officials implored the state Supreme Court to grant new hearings to all those serving life terms for murders committed before they turned 18. Trial judges told the court that Michigan’s now invalidated sentencing rules had left them no alternative but to impose life terms on youngsters who had played only accessory roles in felony murders.

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But Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette objected, arguing that new hearings for 334 juvenile lifers currently in the state’s prisons would force murder victims’ families to relive the trauma of their loved ones’ deaths. (Never mind that some victims’ survivors have publicly supported the juvenile lifers’ campaign for individualized sentencing hearings.)

In supporting Schuette’s position, four Republican justices (including Brian Zahra and David Viviano, who face election battles this November) argued that because three-fourths of Michigan’s juvenile lifers were sentenced more than 20 years ago, it would be prohibitively “burdensome and complicated” for prosecutors and judges to consider the sentencing factors deemed relevant by the Miller v. Alabama court. The justices in the majority also speculated, on the basis of no apparent evidence, that merely considering parole for currently imprisoned juvenile lifers might result “in the premature release of large numbers of persons who will not have fully paid their legal debt to society, many of whom as a result might well continue to pose a physical threat in particular to individuals living in our most vulnerable neighborhoods.”

This is unvarnished demagoguery, perpetuating the false claim that providing constitutionally mandated individualized hearings for young offenders would lead inexorably to the release of dangerous felons.

As Justice Mary Beth Kelly pointed out in her dissent, dividing the juvenile lifer cases at issue among the state’s circuit court bench would give each circuit court judges just two additional cases. And the judges conducting such hearings would have more, not less evidence about each defendant’s capacity for rehabilitation, because they would be able to scrutinize records of post-conviction conduct that typically extend for more than 20 years.

It seems inevitable that the U.S. Supreme Court will eventually order the retroactive application of its ruling in Miller, forcing Michigan to recognize the logic to which the state Supreme Court’s Republican majority willfully turned a blind eye.

In the meantime, the attorney general and two incumbent justices will be able to campaign for re-election on the specious assertion that they have struck a blow for victims of crime.

In reality, a venerable constitutional principle prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment has been temporarily subverted, and 334 Michiganders sentenced to life when they were only kids must again place their hopes for justice with the federal judiciary.